Fiddle geekery, October 2016 edition

This past weekend I had my latest lesson on the fiddle with Lisa Ornstein! We’ve more or less settled into a “once a month” kind of schedule, which is working out pretty well. And it’s a nice long lesson, too. Which is good, because if I’m going to drive all the way down to Olympia, a couple of hours of learning time makes that drive very, very worth it.

Lisa has told me some very gratifying things about how, since I have a bit of an analytical mind, this is standing me in good stead when it comes to understanding the various aspects of playing the instrument. And I certainly have to admit that coming at this as an adult student with a prior musical background is speeding things up a bit–Lisa only has to teach me the physical aspects of playing the instrument. She doesn’t have to teach me how scales work. We just have to focus on how to hold the instrument, how to hold the bow, and how to make noises that don’t suck.

I haven’t been practicing as often as I should, probably. (This is what happens when I have a full time day job AND I have writing to do!) But I do try to pick up the fiddle at least every few days and work my way through scales, and review how to hold the bow properly. We’ve wound up reviewing my bow grip at the beginning of the last couple of lessons, and this past weekend in particular Lisa had me move where I’m putting my thumb. I’ve had a bit of trouble getting it to settle properly on that notch between the grip and the frog–my thumb has a way of bending too much and coming in at a bad angle there. So Lisa had me move the thumb out to rest against the metal sleeve that holds the very bottom end of the bow hairs. She said this was often what Suzuki beginner students are taught, and during the lesson it certainly seemed to me like that gave me a more stable grip on the bow. Moving forward, I’ll be holding my bow like that and we’ll see where that takes me.

(More fiddle geekery behind the fold!)

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Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Nanowrimo 2016: FORTH EORLINGAS

Tonight, after I dine upon a dinner of tofu, I’m going to dive headlong into something I haven’t tried for a few years: an official stab at Nanowrimo.

Up on the block: Warder Soul, Book 3 of the Free Court series. Which, yeah, I’ve actually already started, but I haven’t put nearly as many words into this thing as I should have by now and I’m hoping Nanowrimo will help me out with that. I’m out of the habit of daily writing and I need to fix that pronto. Doing Nano in 2003 when I originally wrote Faerie Blood was very helpful for that. So I’m hopeful that doing it again this year will do it again.

Plus, Faerie Blood was a Nano novel. It would satisfy me deeply to have another book in the series come out of a Nano win too.

So yeah, I’m doing this thing. I’ve woken up my profile on the Nanowrimo site–as always, I’m annathepiper there if anybody else doing Nano wants to buddy up with me.

This time, I’ll also have the advantage that Warder Soul is pretty much already outlined in Scrivener. If I keep to the outline, if all works well, I should be able to chug through this at a much brisker pace than I’m used to.

There will be word count updates here and on my social media accounts, so follow along and cheer me on as I get back into the groove of making life very, very difficult for Team Kendis.

FORTH EORLINGAS!

Who else is doing Nano this year? Join me in the madness!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.